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It is not wasted. This is the most common misunderstanding on this forum. Miners are required to provable expend effort in order to become eligible to produce

It is not wasted. This is the most common misunderstanding on this forum. Miners are required to provable expend effort in order to become eligible to produce a block. 2nd law of thermodynamics as core security mechanism, as it cannot be reversed. If you were to improve efficiency by routing excess heat for other purposes, it will gradually spread across the entire mining industry, and eventually you end up right where we started.

mtsr 6y ago
Which is OPs point. The energy has to be wasted, or else everyone will do it to reduce cost and the difficulty just goes up until the net mining reward is similar to what it is now. And that for something that’s almost exclusively used for speculation, because for anything else transactions costs are too high...
- hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
  Sure, but if the rebates result in wasted energy instead being used for good, then we’re getting an energy benefit while getting better power. Hell, dont pay people, if I was mining and it was similar costs to donate the wasted energy I’d do it.
hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
What?
htk 6y ago
I don’t think GP misunderstood what miners do. What I believe he means by wasted cycles is that the final product in crypto doesn’t have any practical purpose aside from what was agreed on by convention. For any other purpose it’s a wasted effort. This calculation power could instead be used to try to find new practical knowledge, like protein folding to use on new medicine etc.
bouncycastle 6y ago
It's a fallacy that high hashrate means high security. What matters is the % of miners that are honest. (See bitcoin.pdf) High hashrate just means higher difficulty. (The difficulty controls the average time between blocks, so it's always targeting to be 10 min on average). Also, for heating your home, mining bitcoin could end you up with a loss. For example, your heater needs an internet connection, and your heater is will become out-of-date very quickly as new more advanced bitcoin mining gear becomes available. You would also need to have your heater on 24/7 to break even, this it will cost you to turn off the mining heater due to warm weather or to cool it. Not to mention the noise.
- jki275 6y ago
  What matters is the % of miners who don’t collude. Honesty isn’t the issue, collusion is. The entire concept of Bitcoin assumes dishonest players. The only real attack is for miners to combine hash power to get over 50% of the network hash rate so they can execute double spends - and even that is self defeating as doing so degrades confidence and by extension price.
  - sep_field 6y ago
    Only once it gets publicized. You have a window to sell and make an enormous profit before people notice and then the entire bit-conomy gets wrecked. I hope this happens as it is a much better outcome to this mess we've created than wrecking the biosphere.
    - jki275 6y ago
      Yeah, it's a really really tiny window though. chain reorganizations and 50% attacks are really easy to see on the chain and people do watch for them. They've happened on smaller chains that don't have much hash power attached to them, but even there, they're caught very quickly.
- inter_netuser 6y ago
  A) 100% honest miners, 1 hash per century. B) 55% honest miners, 1 googol hashes per second. What is more secure in your view? hashrate is absolutely necessary for high security.
perryizgr8 6y ago
> 2nd law of thermodynamics as core security mechanism LOL... this is the most ridiculous claim I've heard about crypto-mining yet. Might as well buy a truck-full of wine glasses, break them and use the shards of broken glass to prove that I've "expended effort". Now we're using the asymmetry of time itself as a security mechanism. Come to think of it, that may be actually less wasteful than burning the electricity to mine Bitcoin.

mtsr 6y ago

Which is OPs point. The energy has to be wasted, or else everyone will do it to reduce cost and the difficulty just goes up until the net mining reward is similar to what it is now. And that for something that’s almost exclusively used for speculation, because for anything else transactions costs are too high...

hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
Sure, but if the rebates result in wasted energy instead being used for good, then we’re getting an energy benefit while getting better power. Hell, dont pay people, if I was mining and it was similar costs to donate the wasted energy I’d do it.

hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago

What?

htk 6y ago

I don’t think GP misunderstood what miners do. What I believe he means by wasted cycles is that the final product in crypto doesn’t have any practical purpose aside from what was agreed on by convention. For any other purpose it’s a wasted effort. This calculation power could instead be used to try to find new practical knowledge, like protein folding to use on new medicine etc.

bouncycastle 6y ago

It's a fallacy that high hashrate means high security. What matters is the % of miners that are honest. (See bitcoin.pdf) High hashrate just means higher difficulty. (The difficulty controls the average time between blocks, so it's always targeting to be 10 min on average). Also, for heating your home, mining bitcoin could end you up with a loss. For example, your heater needs an internet connection, and your heater is will become out-of-date very quickly as new more advanced bitcoin mining gear becomes available. You would also need to have your heater on 24/7 to break even, this it will cost you to turn off the mining heater due to warm weather or to cool it. Not to mention the noise.

jki275 6y ago
What matters is the % of miners who don’t collude. Honesty isn’t the issue, collusion is. The entire concept of Bitcoin assumes dishonest players. The only real attack is for miners to combine hash power to get over 50% of the network hash rate so they can execute double spends - and even that is self defeating as doing so degrades confidence and by extension price.
- sep_field 6y ago
  Only once it gets publicized. You have a window to sell and make an enormous profit before people notice and then the entire bit-conomy gets wrecked. I hope this happens as it is a much better outcome to this mess we've created than wrecking the biosphere.
  - jki275 6y ago
    Yeah, it's a really really tiny window though. chain reorganizations and 50% attacks are really easy to see on the chain and people do watch for them. They've happened on smaller chains that don't have much hash power attached to them, but even there, they're caught very quickly.
inter_netuser 6y ago
A) 100% honest miners, 1 hash per century. B) 55% honest miners, 1 googol hashes per second. What is more secure in your view? hashrate is absolutely necessary for high security.

perryizgr8 6y ago

> 2nd law of thermodynamics as core security mechanism LOL... this is the most ridiculous claim I've heard about crypto-mining yet. Might as well buy a truck-full of wine glasses, break them and use the shards of broken glass to prove that I've "expended effort". Now we're using the asymmetry of time itself as a security mechanism. Come to think of it, that may be actually less wasteful than burning the electricity to mine Bitcoin.